Quincy Troupefrom An Interview by Jan Garden Castro
Quincy Troupe has been featured on two PBS television series on poetry. In 1991, he received the Peabody Award for co-producing and writing the radio show The Miles Davis Radio Project. Troupe is the author of fourteen books, including seven volumes of poetry: Embryo, Snake-Back Solos (winner of a 1980 American Book Award), Skulls along the River, Choruses, Weather Reports, Avalanche, and Transcircularities, which was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2002 and which received the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award in 2003. His nonfiction books include Miles: The Autobiography (winner of a 1990 American Book Award) and Miles and Me. He edited the 1975 anthology Giant Talk and James Baldwin: The Legacy. Troupe has taught at the University of California-San Diego (where he is Professor Emeritus), Ohio University, The College of Staten Island (CUNY) and Columbia University.
Castro: Quincy, after James Baldwin died, you edited James Baldwin: The Legacy, closing with his "Last interview" in 1987. Baldwin told you, ". . . I could see that there was something in Miles and me which was very much alike . . . something to do with extreme vulnerability . . . See, we evolve a kind of mask, a kind of persona . . . to protect us from all these people who were carnivorous and they think you're helpless. Miles does it one way, I do it another." I'd like to ask you the same question you asked Baldwin: "How do you do it?"
Troupe: How do I mask?
Castro: Yes. How do you mask?
Troupe: I think everyone that lives in the world wears a mask at some time or another in their lives. In the United States people wear masks because of various reasons. Sometimes they don't want to offend people they know; sometimes they don't want to offend certain religious or racial groups and they may temper what they say.
Sometimes artists wear masks when they're creating a persona. Some masks speak for you. Some artists wear a mask all the time and then sometimes take it off. And sometimes taking it off gets you into trouble. If I say something about white people, you know, or if I say something in New York about Jewish people, about what I don't like about Ariel Sharon, then it might get me in trouble, even if it's right, y'know what I mean, because some people might not want to hear it. If I say something about Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, black people might not want to hear it; you know, it gets you in trouble. Or if you say something about Bush today, some people will jump all over you. Religious fanatics jump all over if you say something unfavorable about religion.
Castro: In this neighborhood [Harlem]? In New York?
Troupe: Anywhere, any where. You've got people of all political persuasions all over New York. You have this split culture now that's confused about many different things. People wear masks because of different reasons, sometimes artistic and sometimes political. If you say certain things, then you have vendettas coming at you: 'We won't publish his poems.' 'We won't publish his piece.' 'We won't invite him to do a reading here.' I think people wear masks because of those reasons . . . I wrote an editorial for Black Renaissance Noire [a journal at NYU; Q.T. is the new editor] talking about [sighs], basically, White Nationalism in this country. You don't see black people as talking heads on television; they have no pundits, perhaps a few.
Castro: What about Cornell West, Tavis Smiley . . .
Troupe: They have a certain point of view. Tavis has his own show, basically a black talk show, mostly political, though he does have writers, poets and entertainers on. He's a great host and has a great, serious show, but it's viewed by most whites as a show for blacks. So we've gone back to . . . basically, a segregated situation. Not only in our schools, but in our political, social and cultural opinions, in our neighborhoods, and nobody thinks anything about it. I guess people just think it's normal.
You don't have people asking: Where are the serious African American movies? Why don't we have serious African American art shows? I mean, there are a lot of great African American, Caribbean and African scholars, thinkers, writers and poets. There are a plethora of fabulous, great black stories that great black actors can be in, great black painters and sculptors. But hardly anybody says anything about it, and if you do they think you're trying to make trouble. They think it's normal that the American Academy of Arts and Letters is mostly white people.
Castro: I thought you were a member of the Academy of American Poets. You're listed on their website.
Troupe: I'm listed because of donations that I've given. I'm telling you, there are very few African Americans in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, very few. But nobody seems to mind; they think it's normal. I don't think it's normal. I think it's racist and creates a false image for the arts in the country. At this point in my life, I feel like I should say something. Whereas I used to wear a mask more, I'm taking the mask off, I'm taking the muzzle off now. If it offends people, then they should look at themselves and why it offends them. I mean, if something is wrong, we should be able to say so.
We should be able to say that for the most part the industry of poetry is racist. The industry of literature is racist. There are very few black editors, only a very few, who can green light a book-- maybe one or two that I know of in the publishing industry. If you look at Vanity Fair, they have no black writers. If you look at all the major publications, they have few black writers, or editors, if any. You have very few blacks, Latinos, Native American Indians, or Asians in positions of authority. And people think that's normal. That's not normal when the country, in maybe twenty-five years, is going to be predominantly colored. We are going to be the majority in this country.
One other point about African American critics that John Wideman and I talked about--if you look at the New York Times, you have very few African American people critiquing books, even a black book. You know that they aren't going to let us criticize a white book. But they don't let us criticize African American books either. And then we have all of these white people, many of whom are newcomers who are being made into experts on African American music, books, art, dance and film. A lot of white music critics didn't like it that I wrote the Miles Davis book [Miles: The Autobiography]. And then I wrote Miles and Me. They just didn't like that I would become the expert.
Quincy Troupe's children's book Little Stevie Wonder is due out from Houghton Mifflin in March 2005.
Jan Garden Castro is author of The Last Frontier (poetry), Sonia Delaunay: La Moderne, and The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe and is Contributing Editor for Sculpture.
photograph by Lynda Koolish
